Your news feed is filled with ideas for showing appreciation for law enforcement officers. Saying thank you, paying for their coffee and waving with all your fingers are kind gestures.
There’s no downside to kindness.

But, do you really want to show them you appreciate them?
Really?
Then take it a little further.

Contact your legislators when I share a bill that ensures wounded officers have access to the care they need.
Donating to a GoFundMe is a kind gesture, but a charity fund is a bandaid on an arterial bleed.
No officer should have to beg for help paying the bills while recovering from traumatically-acquired holes they weren’t born with.
No cop’s wife should get a bill for her husband’s mediflight from a crime scene, while he’s still in ICU. It happens.
It shouldn’t.

Help get laws changed in states that allow cities to put officers on the street before they’ve even gone to academy. It’s not safe, and it’s not fair, to the officer or to their community.

If communities want to show they appreciate their law enforcement officers, they won’t wait till after they get killed or hurt, and then call them heroes, and name things after them, so mayors or selectmen can have a photo op by a road sign, or a building.

They’ll buy them vests.
Buy them tourniquets.
Send them to training.
Fix the brakes, and replace the tires.
Find them help after critical incidents.

That’s how lives are honored.